About Me
Viktoria completed her degrees in Environmental Safety as well as Biodiversity and Nature Conservation in Germany and has gained diverse internship and RA work experiences in the environmental field, including: forestry research, environmental governance, conservation research, and applied nature conservation, including habitat management, wildlife monitoring, and environmental education.
About My Research
Viktoria's research is rooted in a passionate interest for pathways towards relational environmental management in collaboration with wildlife and nature as opposed to management of an objectified nature.
Hinz doctoral research is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and follows an internationally growing group of individuals who regularly engage in the private and professional practice of Intuitive Interspecies Communication (IIC), or animal communication, in popular terms. Her descriptive study focuses on the lived experience of what these animal communicators usually describe as an immediate connection and dialogical two-way communication between hearts, souls, minds and bodies of humans and animals, that does not rely on visual or auditory cues and can occur over great distances. Even though the phenomenon is currently under-researched, applications already exist in veterinary care, animal-assisted therapy as well as wildlife conservation and rehabilitation.
Looking ahead, Hinz is interested in the implications of gaining a deeper and comprehensive scientific understanding of Intuitive Interspecies Communication for opening new dialogical spaces with respect to anthropocentrism, human-animal relations, research methods and ethics, applied environmental management, and the representation of animal voices.
Publications
Barrett, M.J., Hinz, V., Wijngaarden, V. & Lovrod, M. (2021). ‘Speaking’ with Other Animals through Intuitive Interspecies Communication: Towards Cognitive and Interspecies Justice. In Eds. Alice Hovorka, Sandra McCubbin and Lauren Van Patter. A Research Agenda for Animal Geographies, Chapter 10. UK: Edward Elgar Publishing.doi.org/10.4337/9781788979993